


Chemicals

by ziyazu



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: ADHD, Fuckbuddies, Junior year, M/M, Roadtrips, Secret Relationship, Sex Makes Your Brain Better, Werewolves Don't Worry About Tetanus, motel sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-26
Updated: 2013-09-26
Packaged: 2017-12-27 17:19:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/981577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ziyazu/pseuds/ziyazu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They lay side by side, panting, because the chemical frenzy that drove them here hasn't quite left their veins yet. It's still pumping their hearts, harshing their breath, ushering sweet salty sweat to the surface of their skin. It leads the way. It runs its course. It's something they've stopped fighting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chemicals

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place during the start of Stiles' junior year.

They lay side by side, panting, because the chemical frenzy that drove them here hasn't quite left their veins yet. It's still pumping their hearts, harshing their breath, ushering sweet salty sweat to the surface of their skin. It leads the way, it runs its course. It's something they've stopped fighting.

After awhile, Stiles gets up and gets dressed. He offers a wave behind him, a tired half-smile, and he's gone.

Derek stretches, sighs, and then rolls over and falls asleep. He doesn't dream.

 

They make it nearly two weeks, the next time.

Derek is angry about something, and Scott is wrathful and roaring in return. Stiles is amped up from a million different things, and Derek can tell from across the room that he's frying, sizzling under his skin, chemicals rushing and buzzing and firing non-stop into his already-crammed-full brain, and he lets himself still, lets him catch his eye. Stiles purses his lips, and Derek glares back at Scott, only a millisecond pause. No one else catches it.

Stiles drives around the block when they all leave, comes back in the front door and straight to Derek, shirt already thrown towards the sofa, shoes shucked somewhere near the door as he walks.

 

It's never something they plan. It happens when it needs to. Derek knows it's still technically a crime, a felony, actually, but he also knows it's keeping Stiles alive and fighting, beating off the darkness around his heart and all around them all. He figures the tradeoff is worth the age difference.

On nights when Stiles shows up late, when he gets a text past midnight, when the headlights of the Jeep roll past the windows of the loft as he parks down the road behind the adjacent warehouse, out of sight of roving patrol cars, Derek waits for him in bed. It feels almost domestic, like the end of a long, slow movie.

The soft clink of keys, and the roll of the door. Shuffled sounds and things placed down, footsteps, a shadow. He never moves until there's a weight sinking over him, usually naked or mostly naked, and then he opens his eyes, grabs Stiles' wrists, and holds him there for a beat in the moonlight.

Tired eyes, sad eyes, frightened eyes; he catalogues what he sees, and he helps. He knows his eyes speak too, knows the chemicals in his brain need things he doesn't know or can't say. Sometimes the chemicals just want to be warm, to be near, to feel safe. Whatever they want, he holds on for a few seconds. He looks, and he holds on. If nothing else, he knows how to ground them now.

 

They flee the city sometimes. Not that Beacon Hills counts as a city, with the tree-covered ridges ringing the small cluster of streets and the forest looming as it swings over the nearby mountains, but they flee anyhow. Derek misses moving, and Stiles wants a quieter brain.

They drive to the coast, usually, but sometimes they just drive aimlessly. South. Sometimes east. They'll stop and have diner food, and in a gas station Stiles will buy a shitty postcard for the fuck of it, and Derek will frown at overpriced Chinese-made carpart knockoffs, and they'll pick a shitty motel to hole up in. They share small, strange spaces easily, hardly any knocked elbows or awkward angles when they fuck quietly in the dark.

Derek likes the morning after, when he wakes up and goes to get coffee and donuts early, gets a weird local paper, watches Stiles wake up and pull his head together. Sometimes he'll give in, get undressed again, wipe crumbs off his mouth as Stiles dozes on his chest and he watches TV on mute, sheets tangling with their bare legs. Sometimes he'll wait in the car while Stiles showers, watching trucks drive by and thinking of nothing at all.

 

Last summer they'd promised it was a one-time thing, a three-time thing at most, a thing that didn't fit, didn't work for them. Derek doesn't remember when they stopped arguing that, trying to convince each other. He figures it was probably when people started dying again. Now when his skin fits right it's because Stiles shaped it with his fingers recently. When it feels torn, and old, and stretched, he knows what to do.

 

In the woods where Derek grew up there is an old shack. He and Laura used to play there when they were small, scrapes from rusty nails holding no fear for werewolf children. It was their hideaway, their fort, and when they found that others used it too, found new footprints covering the mud floor, Derek remembers being livid with anger.

 He had sworn never to go there again, never to go near it, and Laura had been too old by then to care very much. She wanted to run after things and hunt them, to brush her hair and tie it up like she saw other girls doing, wanted to learn about alphas and wolfsbane and witches.

Derek knew he was too old to care too. He had kept away from the shack for months, held his nose high, sneered at any mention of it, and only snuck back when the weather turned cold, holding scents dry and still on the ground.

Two boys, younger than him, their smells crisp and clear. He wandered around in circles, finding their trail and following it back through the trees, back, back towards the older side of town. The backyard he ended up in was like every other one on the street. He kicked a soccer ball left lying in the grass, and he scowled up at the warm glow in the windows.

 

He sits inside sometimes, now, and watches Stiles work on things in the glow. Not often, but enough. He likes knowing that when he lies back in the bed, Stiles watches him with a distracted glance, and he likes to hear his heartbeat trip when he makes a connection to an odd murder, or solves a problem in his homework. He likes to sleep across town, in the loft, with the warm glow behind his eyelids still.

And later on, if he wakes to his phone buzzing, and then he waits in the darkness for - what is it? The fourth time this week? - that's okay too.

He thinks his chemicals are better, these days.

**Author's Note:**

> [ziyazu](http://ziyazu.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr. Come say hi! :)


End file.
